Abstract:

Peer tutoring in mathematics has been widely employed during the last four decades in different educational contexts around the world. Most of the times, it is regarded as an enjoyable and interesting way of learning by many professionals and researchers in education. Nevertheless, students’ opinions regarding this methodology are rarely the main objective of research in most of the articles published in the field. In this research, the opinions of 25 high-school students who learned mathematics through peer tutoring in grade 9th in Spain were registered and analysed. The main objective of the research was to analyse the level of satisfaction regarding the peer tutoring experience as well as students’ perceived value of the peer tutoring method. Ten semi-structured interviews and five discussion groups were held with the students. All the information coming from the interviews and discussion groups was analysed qualitatively using content analysis. Results suggest that most of the students enjoyed the experience. Many of them thought that the experience had been valuable from academic and social perspectives. Nevertheless, some of them did not really understand the way students were paired and thought that they could have benefit more from this methodology if they would have been assigned a different peer. The main conclusion is that, although most students enjoy with peer tutoring and it may be beneficial academically and socially for them, there is a minority of students who do not embrace it and they don’t benefit from it in any way.

Keywords:

peer tutoring, mathematics, high-school, opinions